How do you lose 124,000 people?

I see that the UK Border Agency has “lost” 124,000 asylum seekers and immigrants. It has done this in exactly the same way in which I deal with begging letters from Cancer Research and that charity that wants you to help the little foreign girl with no lips.

Unwilling, out of embarrassment and shame, to just put them straight in the bin, I “file” them in a small tray at the back of my office from where, six months later, my wife puts them in the bin.

This is exactly what the UK Border people do. They call it a “controlled archive”, a place where all these cases are kept for six months and then thrown in the bin.

That’s 124,000 people, or as the Daily Mail put it “a town the size of Cambridge” (although not with quite the same educational qualifications you might find in Cambridge, I’d guess), who shouldn’t be here. I thought the government was going to stop this stuff?